


Personal Ramble/Criticism of Low Fantasy/Medieval themed Series

by DefiantCandle17



Category: Original Work
Genre: Criticism of Game of Thrones, Criticism of low fantasy/medieval series writing in general, Game of Thrones - Freeform, Marco Polo - Freeform, Medici the Magnificent, my personal rambling, the borgias - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:01:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25191337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DefiantCandle17/pseuds/DefiantCandle17
Summary: Just a small essay/ramble on series I have seen and am watching at the moment,As well as personal advice for myself and perhaps others





	Personal Ramble/Criticism of Low Fantasy/Medieval themed Series

After watching the Borgias, Medici the Magnificent, and now Marco Polo, I can well and truly realise how badly Game of Thrones fell over the years. 

The point of the show was that it all featured several characters all scheming and plotting against each other to further their ambitions. You have a consistent person or group who you would admire but otherwise are curious to see how the others/bad guys are doing. You’re left constantly in suspense as to what they get up to and if they succeed or not, and because you aren’t that attached, you want things to descend into chaos when shit falls apart. 

With Game of Thrones, the writers- in general- make the mistake of creating heroic characters, people you want to root for to win. That is a mistake. 

Pope Alexander and Cesare Borgia are men more ruled by their desires than anything heroic or duty compelling them, but because of their unique positions and roles, they are placed in positions of leadership or protector roles as men of the church and how they complete their ambitions is interesting, even if it is dastardly. Plus they have human flaws and motivations to their character.

The Medicis is forced to often do things that blur the moral line, yet we root for them because they are the main characters and are human too. 

Kublai and his family as well as his enemies are essentially power and war mongering despots. They occupy the position of the tyrant or ‘evil king/superpower to be usurped’,because of their actions and how they treat their enemies, but they are also human, and struggle just as much in a sense as Polo does to survive in the Khan’s court. 

All of these characters are traditionally evil in a sense, but are fascinating to behold because their humanity and how the shows do their characters and motivations justice. 

Game of Thrones is a fantasy show that to me, in retrospect, didn’t know what it is. This is very reductive of me to say, but remove the dragons and the walking dead from the north and you would have just a war of the roses power struggle in a low fantasy medieval world. There are no heroes, only ambitions humans battling against each other to secure power.   


That’s what Game of Thrones could have been before the author and following writers decided to include dragons and evil monsters like the Night King to shower it with a lord of the rings feel to distinguish it from The borgias and so forth. 

The Witcher series balances fantasy and medieval story very well, placing the magic as simply another factor in a world ruled by power hungry and fallible human characters and empires. There’s the prophecy and encounters with magical creatures, but other than that it is not the ruling factor of the world Geralt inhabits.It leaves room to focus on character development and progress in a very human world and rids it of the black and white mindset you would find in cliched fantasy stories.   


Geralt doesn’t side with a nation or a cause- he’s just trying to survive with his trade as a monster hunter and protect the people he loves and save his adoptive daughter by fate from a world that wants to use her for a variety of sinister purposes. 

Going back on topic- I believe that if when writing to create a fantasy world, are you trying to create a good vs evil world, or a human world where numerous goods, many evils and an infinite realm of self-interested quasi good and quasi evil motivated powers fight and compete to rule on top, where choosing one side or faction may just as well doom the world as well as choosing another? 

Game of Thrones tried and miserably failed to do this with the ending. If we were to believe that Daenerys was no different from all the other rulers or her ancestors when she ‘went mad’, we should have seen hints of it or subplots of her choosing to be selfish, or perhaps being cunning and have moments of ruthlessness and Machiavellian brilliance and force of will instead of a slave freeing equality advocating princess who turns mad just because of a dumb in lore reason, placed as a contingency trigger word for sake of idiotic shock value.**  


  
Game of Thrones should not have given us heroes like her in a world where no such things like an ultimate established good triumphing over an established and unilaterally agreed form of evil exists.   


Instead, they should have given us flawed characters against flawed characters where it is easy to root for more than one character because we relate to their failings as well as their moments of triumph because, like us, they are ultimately motivated by self-interest in a world that since time immemorial, rewards you for nothing else following that path. How they go about that path, following or negotiating it or shunning it or full-on charging and careening down that path, is what makes them interesting. 

A lot to think about.

*addendum- maintaining the integrity of such storylines without compromise such as deus ex machinas or magic prophecies coming into play is also an important challenge but ultimately rewarding. You leave the readers expecting little yet wanting more.

** this is not to say I am not a fan of Daenerys. However, as I said, I would have preferred that she was a more morally grey character in the series in keeping with perhaps the other ruthless and driven characters in GOT. I also do not believe that she is wrong in freeing slaves and insisting on breaking the wheel, although in retrospect it does smack a bit of the white saviour trope and doesn’t quite fit the point of the Game of Thrones or the system of monarchy. In a universe like GOT, there is only the wheel, and Daenerys did not deserve to be in such a world.   
neither did Jon. If the show focussed perhaps on only Jon as a naive, duty bound and honourable man limited by his birth, conflicted with following the way of the world against what he knows is right, he might have been a more compelling character. That, or perhaps as the numerous tumblr essays I have encountered, he should have been more like the feared and ruthless man he was in the books.   
Take this as a proverbial lesson in never overtaking or going beyond your source material.   
and don’t go into wish fulfilment territory as GOT did from season 6 onwards.


End file.
